Massive Slavery are a young and talented Canadian band with a lot going on – too much going on. Fusing melodic death metal with metalcore/deathcore, tech death and even a few hints of thrash, their sound is all over the place and more times than not, lacks cohesion.

When they’re on though, they’re really on. This is usually when they go for a more straight forward melodic death approach without all the genre hopping (“The Denial of Man’s Regression”, “Wider We Open Our Eyes”, “Pull the Plug On Modern Civilization”), or the one occasion where the fusion works really well, “Humanity’s Last Hope”. It’s on these tracks you hear the tightest performances, great lead work and solid songwriting.

When they’re not on, we get the heavily core influenced and breakdown happy numbers with out of place sounding tech flourishes like album opener “MediAssassNation”, “Shade of Corruption”, “Destroy, Rebuild, Repeat”, and the title track, complete with out of nowhere “breee bree bree” pig squeals. Closer “Generalized Cyberphobia” gets off to a great start as a tech death monster, then suddenly becomes a core-riffic over-extended breakdown the second half of the song.

Global Enslavement is not a bad debut, but Massive Slavery have much more talent than is shown here. They’re a band that needs to find their sound and capitalize on that skill, or find a better way to marry all those influences.

[Visit the band's website]

---

Comments